As is common and unavoidable in the painting industry, painters' equipment and work product is often splattered with paint in the course of a job. Over time and numerous painting jobs, splattered paint left to dry on equipment or projects becomes extremely difficult to remove. In order to combat this war against splattered paint, professional painters are constantly cleaning their equipment and work with inexpensive and commercially available rags.
The rag industry is typically supplied with the raw material for the rag product from clothing companies' surplus or discard stock of cotton cloth. As is very often the case, rag raw material from the clothing companies is dyed various colors and undesirable to professional painters in this state. Professional painter generally prefer rags with bleached white or a uniform neutral color in order to discern that when equipment or paint projects need to be wiped clean of fresh paint, the rag that they are grabbing is, indeed, clean and will not bleed color onto the object they are attempting to clean.
In order to provide professional painters with a rag having white or a uniform neutral color, the rag industry bleaches their raw product with extremely strong and nocuous smelling bleach. Even after the rag raw material has been bleached and processed into generally uniformly sized rags to be packaged and sold, a residual nocuous odor from the bleach remains embedded therein. The rag industry has generally simply bagged the processed rags in plastic bagging which, when ripped open by a painter, releases bleach fumes to be inhaled by the painter. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide bleached rags so that a purchaser would not be overwhelmed by bleach fumes upon opening a plastic bag containing rags.
Another problem faced by professional painters these days is that, while paint is generally less expensive to purchase, it is also of lesser quality. This inexpensive paint often has impurities, e.g., coagulated paint, that must be removed by a painter before the paint may be used. If the impurities are not removed, a painter may have to apply multiple coats of paint, thereby increasing the job costs, or possibly even lose painting jobs because of customer word-of-mouth relating unsatisfactory work.